Making Semi-Automatic Segmentation Method to be Automatic Using Deep Learning for Biventricular Segmentation

Ventricular Segmentation or Delineation of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMRI) is significant in obtaining the cardiac contractile function, which in turn is taken as input for diagnosing Cardio Vascular Diseases (CVD). Many automatic and semi-automatic methods were evolved to meet the constraints of diagnosing CVDs. Among these, semi-automatic methods require user intervention for delineation of ventricles, which consumes time and leads to intra and inter-observability, as with manual delineation. Thus, the automatic method is suggested by most of the researchers to address the above-stated problem. We proposed Saliency-based Active contour U-Net (SACU-Net) for automatic bi-ventricular segmentation which is found to surpass the existing highest developed methods regarding closeness to the gold standard. Three schemes are used by our proposed algorithm, namely 1. Saliency Detection Scheme for Region of Interest (ROI) Localization to concentrate only on Object of Interest, 2. Drop-out embedded U-net for Initial Contour evolution that performs initial segmentation and 3. Local-Global-based Regional active Contour (LGRAC) to fine-tune and avoid leaking, merging of ventricles during Delineation. We used three datasets namely Automatic Cardiac Diagnosing Challenge (ACDC) of MICCAI 2017, Right Ventricular Segmentation Challenge (RVSC) of MICCAI 2012, and Sunny Brook (SB) of MICCAI 2009 dataset to test the adaptability nature of our algorithm over different scanner resolutions and protocols. 100 and 50 CMRI Images of ACDC were used for training and testing respectively which obtained average Dice Coefficient (DC) metric of 0.963, 0.934, and 0.948 for Left Ventricular Cavity (LVC), Left Ventricular Myocardium (LVM), and Right Ventricular Cavity (RVC) respectively. 32 and 16 CMRI Images of RVSC are used for preparing and experimenting respectively, which obtained an average DC metric of 0.95 for RVC.30 and 15 CMRI Images of SB are used for preparing and experimenting respectively, which obtained average DC metric of 0.96 and 0.97 for LVC and LVM, respectively. Hausdorff Distance (HD) Metrics are also calculated to learn the distance of proposed delineated ventricles to reach the gold standard. The above resultant metrics show the robustness of our proposed SACU-Net in the segmentation of ventricles of CMRI than previous methods.